Meeting notes for meeting on 10/25/08.

Attendees: John Downey, Jimmy Wong, Wendy Chan, Betty Yau, Kevin To, Victor Ng, Ankur Tandon and James Luo

Meeting was called to order at 10:15am by co-chairmen, Jimmy Wong & John Downey.

Quality Interpreter’s Services

We decided to stay on as an advisory group. We will keep on advocating awareness on quality interpretation. We would like to suggest that if no quality interpretation can be arranged, message should be kept in English only. Also, the term “bilingual” should be better defined as “equally bilingual”. Bilingual in Cantonese and English means that the person should hold both language skills equally well.

The thought on holding a mini-conference is put off since at this time, this is beyond our resource and capacity. Wendy Chan whose profession is in the interpretation business will help us develop a list of interpretation/ translation services. The list will be posted on http://www.quincyasian.org

About how we can engage Chinese-Americans to be more involved in civic matters:

By observation, while many of the social services for Chinese residents in Quincy now are focused on survival skills and new-arrival adjustments, there is a significant number of Chinese residents/immigrants should have been living in the City long enough to face many other or more challenges. We talked about

-          political canvassing

-          recycling awareness

-          pubic safety/ neighborhood crime watch

-          U.S. Census participation

-          At-large community event participation, such as Flag Day parade, Christmas parade, veteran parade … etc.

-          Public meeting/event norms and manners

Many of us agreed that we should keep an open mind about how we should invite our fellow Chinese members to be more involved. We are optimistic that Quincy has come to a time that a supportive climate is ready for a true civic-engagement empowerment to take place. We look forward to more open discussions on civic matters that are beyond basic survival skills. Meanwhile, we are also aware that all new comers/immigrants need help.

More discussions will be continued at next month’s meeting. We hope that attendees will invite other concerned and interested Quincy residents to join us.

Mandarin classes:

Coming soon in early next year in 2009. For more details, please click:

http://www.quincyasian.org

Web site overhaul:

Ankur showed us a new web-site template. A new web site will soon be in operation.

Next meeting:

Sat., Nov 22, 2008, 10:00am 

at N. Quincy Community Center, 
381 Hancock St., N. Quincy
next to the N. Quincy Thomas Crane Library

Meeting adjourned at 11:45am.

Respectfully submitted,